The Shrine

I'm sure this must have been a hoot to play when it came out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexy_Parodius


Sample in-game screenshot - COMPLETELY NSFW

http://d.hatena.ne.jp/images/diary/c/ca ... -11-15.jpg

Meh. It's just an ass crack.

You need to get out more

Tessian, I just think it's hilarious, and I'm sorry if you have such a need to look down on other people that feel like you have to throw out insults over it. It's not like I'm sitting here beating off to it, it's just something I found amusing. I thought other people might find it funny too.

Things that are not worth fighting or talking trash over = this.

Heh... this takes me way back. That game is older than the carton of chocolate milk sitting behind my computer tower.

Mildly amusing title but without the zomg pr0n factor it hasn't much going for it.

Any Gradius V fans here? Now that's a quality shmup.

KluYa wrote:Heh... this takes me way back. That game is older than the carton of chocolate milk sitting behind my computer tower.

Mildly amusing title but without the zomg pr0n factor it hasn't much going for it.

Any Gradius V fans here? Now that's a quality shmup.

I love a good classic shmup. I haven't tried V. If you would be so kind as to point me at a ROM (I'm sure I have the original "locked in a drawer somewhere" cough cough) I will most certainly check it out.

I have no idea if Sexy Parodius is actually any good, but I do wholeheartedly recommend Parodius I and II, which are at least as good as any of the Gradius titles I've played (the original and II to completion as well as part of III, I think). I was so, so entertained by P-I and II, which are just more generally cutesy and have no need for the pixelated porno gimmick.

Also, I regret to inform you that you no longer have chocolate milk behind your computer tower, you now have chocolate cheese.

I'm not able to point a ROM at you offhand since I don't do any PS2 emulation. I play it on my console. Unfortunately, the game's rather hard to come by these days. If you have a modded PS2 then I suppose I could accidentally burn a copy and see if it somehow ends up mailed in your general direction.

Konami went and got Treasure to develop the title and it tailors itself to the hardcore shmup gamer. The gameplay is regarded as the best in the series despite having only one ship to choose (there are more than enough weapons to customize with) and the difficulty on the appropriate settings can rival Mushihimesama Futari's ultra mode. Youtube has a handful of gameplay videos such as this one.

Holy F. Everytime i see bullet hell videos i'm a little shocked, but this one was flat out insane!

I'm an enormous Treasure fan and only dabbled in Gradius 5 a bit. It's Treasure so I'm sure it'll be great (look how awesome Astro Boy for the GBA turned out). I'm still working on Ikaruga on and off. We can get to the start of Level 4.

Zeus wrote:I'm an enormous Treasure fan and only dabbled in Gradius 5 a bit. It's Treasure so I'm sure it'll be great (look how awesome Astro Boy for the GBA turned out). I'm still working on Ikaruga on and off. We can get to the start of Level 4.

Just sold my GameCube version of Ikaruga for $35 on eBay. About $5 short of what I paid for it. Fucking waste of money!

SineSwiper wrote:

Zeus wrote:I'm an enormous Treasure fan and only dabbled in Gradius 5 a bit. It's Treasure so I'm sure it'll be great (look how awesome Astro Boy for the GBA turned out). I'm still working on Ikaruga on and off. We can get to the start of Level 4.

Just sold my GameCube version of Ikaruga for $35 on eBay. About $5 short of what I paid for it. Fucking waste of money!

The game is a waste of money? Are you kidding me, it's freakin' awesome.

What didn't you like? Was it too hard for you? Did you curl up in the fetal position in the corner licking your palms after playing it? :-)

(raises hand)

Which isn't to say that I still didn't love it, but, holy hell.

Gradius V highlights everything that's wrong about the bullet hell genre. It's a game that isn't meant to be beaten at all by normal guys and while unlimited continues unlock after 18 hours, who is going to waste 18 hours if you can only get to stage 3? Also I think Gradius is still a suppression-type shooter at heart which means you got to kill the stuff before they can shoot at you or it becomes absolutely undodgeable. It's not the same as Touhou or Mushihime where the enemies tend to fire their full pattern no matter how much firepower you have, which means you always have the same amount to dodge.

At least there's a boss attack mode in Gradius V though, not that I ever unlocked it.

KluYa wrote: Youtube has a handful of gameplay videos such as this one.

Holy shit, I pity the guy who actually gets to any reasonable stage of that game without powerups or dies in the middle of the stage.

I think I'll pass after all, Klu. Thanks anyway.

I think the problem with the modern shmup is that for the hardcore shmuplayer, there is no difficulty level hard enough, and for everybody else, they'll throw the game through a window or a friend's torso within about ten minutes of pressing the start button.

Ah, I miss Einhander...possibly the most perfect shooter for me that I've ever played, such a wonderfully SANE game compared to these Touhou and bullet hell discussions.

The thing about the great ones like Ikaruga and Radiant is that even though there 100,000 bullets on the screen at once, it's never "what the fuck, this is impossible". It's always beatable if you just sit back and think about it (and have the skill to do it). That's what makes them so great over the ones that just have bullets everywhere and you essentially have no choice but to get hit

With the exception of Gradius series, just about every bullet hell game has a pattern that is always avoidable. Whether anybody has the skill to put it off is another question altogether. Even stuff like the hacked Touhou Ultra modes where they really shoot 10000 bullets at you at once has somewhere you can dodge this stuff. If you slow the game down to 1/2 or 1/10 which is how poeple actually play those modes, you can see where you need to go to avoid them. That's because all the bullets are intended to be fired in a certain pattern, and repeated forever. If there is a hole in that pattern is will always be there, no matter how hard it is to see it.

Gradius, though, has enemies that just keep on shoot you based on your position forever. They're clearly meant to be killed to reduce the bullets you have to face, which means on the converse if you failed to kill enough enemies it is entirely possible to have so many things shooting at you that there is no way to dodge it whatsoever. This is why if you die even once in Gradius you might as well start over because you can no longer suppress the enemy fire. Compared to this, even the worst bullet hell doesn't have this kind of game over mechanism. You might lose your firepower which means the boss will take longer to die, which means there's more chance for you to die, but the boss and the enemies will never fire an unavoidable pattern simply due to the virtue of being alive.

You can beat Ikaruga without killing a single enemy if you're good enough. You can do this for Touhou or Mushihimesame or any of the crazy shooters if you're good enough. But you cannot beat Gradius doing this no matter how good you are. At some point the density of the bullet becomes undodgeable.

I heard a game on the DC call Rez is like a shooter and it has a mode call observe where you just go around the stage and you cannot die and you can't hit anything. This seems like a good idea for crazy shooters. Unlimited continues is another good idea. I mean I thought the point of beating these crazy hard shooters is to do it without dying. The Koreans came up with a Touhou game from the Touhou Danmukufu engine and the last boss has like 150 lifebars and takes 2 hours to kill. But the game gives you unlimited continues, so even the suckiest player can beat the game. You just might need to continue 100 times in the process. Presumably if you're awesome you could do this with continuing, though I've never heard of anybody being able to pull this off.

Don wrote:Gradius, though, has enemies that just keep on shoot you based on your position forever. They're clearly meant to be killed to reduce the bullets you have to face, which means on the converse if you failed to kill enough enemies it is entirely possible to have so many things shooting at you that there is no way to dodge it whatsoever. This is why if you die even once in Gradius you might as well start over because you can no longer suppress the enemy fire. Compared to this, even the worst bullet hell doesn't have this kind of game over mechanism. You might lose your firepower which means the boss will take longer to die, which means there's more chance for you to die, but the boss and the enemies will never fire an unavoidable pattern simply due to the virtue of being alive.

You can beat Ikaruga without killing a single enemy if you're good enough. You can do this for Touhou or Mushihimesame or any of the crazy shooters if you're good enough. But you cannot beat Gradius doing this no matter how good you are. At some point the density of the bullet becomes undodgeable.

Don, Gradius V can be cleared start to finish without firing a single bullet. I've done this personally (I actually did press the button only to go through the regenerating wall in stage 4) and I don't consider myself an expert. Because of this, there isn't any part of the game that would do someone in simply for lacking enough firepower. You might be referring to another title in the series but I can't think of which game that might be.

I'd recommend that anyone frustrated by the difficulty of Gradius V simply turn the difficulty level down =p. You can set it to "very easy" in the options and even adjust the number of lives you get to your liking. If there are still people that have trouble with the game on these settings, then I guess I concede that the game isn't for everybody. I find it very enjoyable myself though. It's well designed and it's challenging (on hard enough settings) without being cheap about it's difficulty.

On a boss attack mode, I saw a guy doing Elephant Walker who constantly rotates his options to kill all the new little guys that constantly show up and clearly that was necessary. Maybe you can argue if you're super duper good you'd never need to kill the reinforcement guys that keep on coming but obviously killing them drops the difficulty of the boss significantly when you don't have to worry about 10 little guys constantly shooting you.

If you take a boss like the Alien Heart, if you're lacking in firepower it takes way longer to go through the shield, and when the shield is down you do way less damage to the heart itself before the shield regenerates. The time it takes to beat that guy is roughly correlated by (firepower^2). Now in this case the boss doesn't actually shoot any more, but paying a x^2 penalty for lack of firepower is rather severe.

I don't see how you can say Gradius is not a shooter based solely on firepower. If you die even once the game is about 10 times harder at that point because you're never getting your options/lasers back normally. In Gradius V at least you can get some of your options back, but you still don't have all the other powerups.

KluYa wrote:
Don, Gradius V can be cleared start to finish without firing a single bullet. I've done this personally (I actually did press the button only to go through the regenerating wall in stage 4) and I don't consider myself an expert.

This leads me to believe that your definition of "expert" is synonymous with the word "SkyNet". You make me feel very bad about myself every time I actually understand how much more "insane gamer feat" cred you have than all the rest of us.

Don wrote:I don't see how you can say Gradius is not a shooter based solely on firepower.

Because there is nothing about Gradius (I'm referring to V specifically just to make certain I know exactly what I'm talking about) that makes it any more about firepower than all kinds of other shmups out there. The game becomes easier in some respects after a death. You almost always recover your options, and sucking it up briefly while you collect the other power ups is not the end of the world. Attack patterns and level design were carefully thought through, and always allow for an out. We're talking about Treasure here... it's their trademark. Only on the highest loops will a bullet stream become impenetrable, forcing you to either destroy the enemy or fly ahead quickly before the stream blocks your progress, but the high loops are only intended for players who've mastered the game under normal conditions and want a better challenge. The majority of gamers out there need not concern themselves with any of that.

I don't know how much Gradius V you play but consider giving the game another shot ("shot"... cue the applause) on a low difficulty level to start and you may rethink the notion that this is a game based "solely" (lol) on firepower.

Replay wrote:

KluYa wrote:
Don, Gradius V can be cleared start to finish without firing a single bullet. I've done this personally (I actually did press the button only to go through the regenerating wall in stage 4) and I don't consider myself an expert.

This leads me to believe that your definition of "expert" is synonymous with the word "SkyNet". You make me feel very bad about myself every time I actually understand how much more "insane gamer feat" cred you have than all the rest of us.

I'm thinking this has something to do with the YouTube vid I linked to. That video isn't indicative of the kind of challenge the casual player can expect to face on a normal playthrough - it's high loop gameplay meaning unless you manage to play through the whole game a few times in a row while the difficulty gradually increases to get to that point, you won't have to worry about bullet fire anywhere near that dense. =p

I never meant to imply the game is intended for superhuman experts only. It can be very difficult under the right circumstances (a lot harder than what that ancient YT vid would suggest) but it's perfectly tame when you tone down the difficulty setting. Like walking through the park on a warm autumn afternoon. Eating cake. Chocolate cake.

With chocolate cheese on top from your forgotten chocolate milk container.

If I recall 'high loop' refers to loop 255, like after beating the game continously for 254 times.

This conversation reminds me of the "Touhou for the rest of us" thread on the Chinese boards. A guy who is said to be 'not an expert' set out to capture Mokou Fujiwara's Imperishable Shooting in TH8, the final pattern of what is probably the easiest optional boss in the series. It took him something like 300 hours to capture Imperishable Shooting on a normal gameplay. If you're willing to spend that much time on a shooter you can eventually do it, but the rest of us generally have better things to do with our time.

Best comment on the bullet hell genre yet, from one of the YouTube videos for the last boss of Mushihimesama Futari that I found while wondering what the hell he was talking about: "No wonder the Japanese are epileptic and suicidal."

I think the hacked version of Touhou are even worse. They're described as having this wall of moving death coming in your general direction and when it reaches you, you die, even if you slowed down the game to 1/2 or more (nobody actually plays them at normal speed). Maybe if you've like DBZ powers to see what the eye cannot see you could play them... but other than that, they're clearly not meant to be played by normal humans.

I remember I had a hacked version of Super Mario Brothers. There's one stage where you start on top of a pit, and you just fall into it and die. There's no way to not die. That's what some of these games feel like.

I love a schmup. outside of treasure though I hate the bullet hell. Gimme UN Squadron anyday.

Zeus wrote:The game is a waste of money? Are you kidding me, it's freakin' awesome.

What didn't you like? Was it too hard for you? Did you curl up in the fetal position in the corner licking your palms after playing it? :-)

No, I was standing there after dying a few times thinking "Is this it?" Yes, you have the whole black/white thing and well, that's it. That's the whole game.

Plus, what Don said about these games rings true. If only the experts can beat the game, then only the experts will bother playing the game. Sure, I'd like to have some hard strategy games sometimes, but at least I'm using my brain. And Ninja Gaiden was hard. But it was rewarding. When you finally got how to play, you got to see wicked combos and fun gameplay.

Bullet hell games are just mindnumbing and boring and insanely frustrating. I don't consider that "fun".

Don wrote:If I recall 'high loop' refers to loop 255, like after beating the game continously for 254 times.

This conversation reminds me of the "Touhou for the rest of us" thread on the Chinese boards. A guy who is said to be 'not an expert' set out to capture Mokou Fujiwara's Imperishable Shooting in TH8, the final pattern of what is probably the easiest optional boss in the series. It took him something like 300 hours to capture Imperishable Shooting on a normal gameplay. If you're willing to spend that much time on a shooter you can eventually do it, but the rest of us generally have better things to do with our time.

Loops 31 to 256 are identical, and are also virtually the same as loops 11 to 30. There are japanese players who play on loop 256 "just to be sure", but the gameplay is more or less the same as loop 10 or 11. For the rest of you, as you put it, there's no point in wetting your pants over the difficulty on the higher loops if you're not good enough to get there in the first place. Stick to what you can handle. Considering that a piece of scotch tape over the X button can beat this game in like 80 minutes or so, I can't imagine it taking you too much longer than it takes the scotch tape. But, if you have better things to do with your time than play video games, more power to ya.

Here's my progression through Touhou: Concealed the Conclusion, the fan game that is widely viewed as harder than the hardest Touhou game on any difficulty (easy vs easy, lunatic vs lunatic).

Put the game on easy difficulty.
Play and die horribly at stage 3.
Repeat this 3 times.

At this point, I realize that I suck, and changed the number of lives from 3 to 7 or 9 or whatever the game allows.

Play and die at stage 5.
Play and die at stage 6 (final stage).
Get to final boss, die, continue, and watch final boss seal your continues when you try to continue and game over.

Repeat a couple of times.
Realize that you suck at this game and bombs pretty much wipes out an entire lifebar at a time.
Bomb your way to victory on the final boss.
After beating final boss's first form, she seals your bombs and remaining lives and you instantly lose. However this is obviously the 'challenge' part of the game. You get the real ending regardless of how good you did on the final part.

Now go take one of the more *modern* Touhou like say TH10.

Put setting on easy.
Realize that you cannot increase your life any (it's not an option).
Play a few times, get to stage 6 (final stage).
Die on stage 6 horribly.
Select continue, and realize that this sends you back to the beginning of the stage with 3 lives.
Realize that the final boss is immune to bombs and you only get 3 of them out of your entire 3 lives (dying doesn't replenish them).
Continue and die horribly again.
And again.
And again.
And realize that you're never actually going to beat this game if all you ever have is 3 lives at the beginning of the stage.
Never play the game again.

And the funny thing TH10 is not a very hard game, but the choice on continue/lives makes it more inaccessible compared to another game that is far harder. You can always beat Concealed the Conclusion in a very gimpy way (pick 9 lives, use every bomb you have right away) and while that's not going to earn you any cool points with the 'hardcore' guys, it's good enough for you to finish the game. The other games, despite a lower difficulty, chooses to limit you to 3 lives and force you to start over to ensure you'll never beat it if you suck!

Here's a hacked version of TH6, they call this the 'ultra' mode:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EQOc4cWcYw

The guy playing it played it at half speed. This guy can obviously beat it on the Lunatic mode without continuing.

Not to mention this super duper hard mode destroyed any sense of beauty in Remilia's attack patterns...

Don wrote:I think the hacked version of Touhou are even worse. They're described as having this wall of moving death coming in your general direction and when it reaches you, you die, even if you slowed down the game to 1/2 or more (nobody actually plays them at normal speed). Maybe if you've like DBZ powers to see what the eye cannot see you could play them... but other than that, they're clearly not meant to be played by normal humans.

I remember I had a hacked version of Super Mario Brothers. There's one stage where you start on top of a pit, and you just fall into it and die. There's no way to not die. That's what some of these games feel like.

Actually, since once there are no contiguous holes in the bullet pattern left for you to fly a ship through you generally DO die, and since having programmed these kinds of systems I know that there's no magical algorithm whatsoever that guarantees you that those holes are going to exist at any given second, I would say that's an accurate assessment.

KluYa wrote:
Loops 31 to 256 are identical, and are also virtually the same as loops 11 to 30. There are japanese players who play on loop 256 "just to be sure",

Have there been any bullet-hell related hardcore "die of dehydration" deaths in Japan at this point? It seems reasonable to assume so given the information you're giving us on the genre.

SineSwiper wrote:

Zeus wrote:The game is a waste of money? Are you kidding me, it's freakin' awesome.

What didn't you like? Was it too hard for you? Did you curl up in the fetal position in the corner licking your palms after playing it? :-)

No, I was standing there after dying a few times thinking "Is this it?" Yes, you have the whole black/white thing and well, that's it. That's the whole game.

Plus, what Don said about these games rings true. If only the experts can beat the game, then only the experts will bother playing the game. Sure, I'd like to have some hard strategy games sometimes, but at least I'm using my brain. And Ninja Gaiden was hard. But it was rewarding. When you finally got how to play, you got to see wicked combos and fun gameplay.

Bullet hell games are just mindnumbing and boring and insanely frustrating. I don't consider that "fun".

All great games have simple concepts with excellent execution. If you make things too complicated it becomes a chore for the player rather than fun. Unless you're talking about the strategy and RTS crowd on the PC but they're crazy people :-)

It's all in the execution. The main gameplay mechanic is switching back and forth but it's how you use it and the depth of strategy you can reach by that simple mechanic that's awesome. Look at the expert players. They don't just shoot everything in sight, they actually switch back and forth shooting the exact same colour enemy to rack up INSANE scores. They also switch back and forth at the right times to make the game a helluva lot easier than it initially appears to be.

I'm no expert and I beat Radiant Silvergun and have gotten to the last level in Ikaruga on my own back in the day on the Dreamcast. You don't have to be an expert, they're not THAT hard. You just have to think about it and work your way through it. You'll realize after a while that what you found to be very difficult actually ain't that bad once you get better at it and get more and more into the gameplay mechanic.

That's what makes the Treasure games so damned great. Simple but much deeper than they look. Think of them more as action/puzzle games than anything because that's really what they are. Even Astro Boy on the GBA was like that. Bangai-O on the DC and DS is the same as well.

There's nothing particular deep about memorizing certain patterns. It's no more complicated than watching a Starcraft replay to learn some build order. Bullet hell games by their nature is very gimmicky. For example I was doing Unseasonal Butterfly Storm on TH8 and it took me like 350 tries before I realize that all you have to do is move up and down and never left and right, and then got it in about 5 tries. And then I saw a video showing you that there is a safe spot where you never have to move.

The vast majority of the high scoring bullet hell videos look like some kind of dumb gimmick as opposed to any semblance of skill. Half of the high score videos in Touhou basically involve a guy moving left to right really, really slowly since that's one of the popular gimmicks in the series.

For example, I have a replay of myself for Shoot the Moon on Normal in TH8 which looks like some kind of epic fight that involves switching forms every 2 seconds to dodge the pattern. If you go to Youtube for the same pattern done by experts you'll either find:

1. One guy standing on upper left corner and moving very slowly to the bottom left corner .
2. One guy standing on bottom left corner and very slowly move to the bottom right corner while clearing it.

Now there's nothing wrong with spending time to find out cool way to do something, as long as it's possible to do it at all. Problem is that if you can never do something then there's no point to play the game.

Don wrote:There's nothing particular deep about memorizing certain patterns.

This is I think why I consider Gradius V one of the best shmups I've played. You said it yourself by pointing out that:

Don wrote:With the exception of Gradius series, just about every bullet hell game has a pattern that is always avoidable.

This IMO adds a lot to the replayability of the game, because there are many areas and enemies where you can't much rely on predictability. The area select and boss rush modes add a lot too.

Anyway.... most shooters aren't particularly deep in terms of strategy. They do however emphasize a lot more on skill and quick thinking than the majority of games being churned out today.

Don wrote:There's nothing particular deep about memorizing certain patterns.

I don't see Ikaruga and Radiant that way at all. The level of depth comes in the fact that you can take it to a whole new level if you're good enough. But you don't have to beat it. You can memorize the patterns to a certain extent and you have many ways to make it through but the depth comes in mastering the gameplay techniques to make it much easier on yourself on the way through. When I played both Ikaruga and Radiant I noticed myself getting better and better at it and learned better and easier ways to make it through levels. Then you watch the masters who can control 2 ships at once and pull of crazy precise shit and you can see what you can really do with the mechanics.

The vast majority of games are about memorizing patterns. Hell, even games like Gears 2 and CoD 2 or 4 (on Veteran) are about pattern memorization. Ikaruga and Radiant played much more like an action-puzzler than just twitch-dodging which is what makes them far deeper than basically any other shooter out there.

Ikaruga is the very definition of memorization. Look at the insane S++ rated replays on the final stage. If you go from White to Black at this spot at time X like the guy did it ALWAYS WORKS. It's not like sometimes the enemy shoots black instead of white bullets. It may look very impressive but it's merely just memorization. If there's always a wave of black follow by a wave of white then going from black and then white always works. It's no different than say standing in a safe spot in one of Touhou's pattern where you never have to move and win. Another common 'cool trick' in Touhou involves going in a circle around the enemy. Again this is just total memorization. As long as you know how big a circle to make around the enemy at what time it will always work. It might look like you're doing some crazy reflex thing but all you're doing is going in a circle.

Obivously unless a shooter starts employing random patterns (but in that case that just means you got more stuff to memorize), ultimately everything can be memorized. But the pattern you speak of are the type where the hard part is the memorizing not the manuevering. In some of the Ikaruga videos the guy isn't even moving his ship at all, which means as long as you're flipping the polarity at the right time you don't even need any perception. It's quite different from say navigating between a swarm of bullets with somewhat irregular spacing. Sure ultimately that is all memorization too since the irregular spacing are still deterministic, but that is probably more reflex-based than just remembering that after the 3rd row there's a 2 bullet gap in the middle, and then a 3 bullet gap in the right.

KluYa wrote:This is I think why I consider Gradius V one of the best shmups I've played. You said it yourself by pointing out that:

GV is good because the game is about collecting power ups, and having a wide array of selection for those power ups. And it's about killing enemies, not dodging bullets. After all, Gaxalican and Galaga were never about dodging bullets, but killing enemies.

Again, I never denied that there wasn't pattern memorization. But that can describe almost every game out there. Having pattern memorization in your game doesn't mean it ain't got depth

I went to check some of my Touhou expert replays and found some pretty good examples on memorization versus not. One of the replays on Flandre, all the guy does is going in a rectangle box centered around bottom middle of the screen the whole time. He might be moving really fast and it looks like he's doing some totally crazy things, but if you look carefully all he ever does is go around in a rectangular path with varying speed, except the speed isn't random either. You'll see the guy always accelerate to max speed while going verticially, and then slow down halfway while doing the horizontal path, and then accelerate again. Obviously the guy has figured out this is the optimal path to both avoid all the bullets and maximize scoring. You can see his ship always land in the exact same pixel each pass, and assuming no fatigue related issues, you can expect him still going on the same rectangular path an hour later and still dodging everything perfectly.

On the other hand, take Remilia, generally considered as a harder boss than Flandre even though Flandre is the hidden boss. Her 5th pattern, Scarlet Meister, is routinely uncleared on a scoring run. This is because it's both extremely hard, and that clearing Scarlet Meister increases the game's difficulty to a level that will ensure you almost certainly will fail her final pattern, which is worth far more points. If you watch the replays enough, it is pretty clear that you're supposed to start at the bottom middle of the screen, and then go around the right side of the screen in a semi-circle, and then returning to the bottom of the screen at the end of one pass and repeat this until you win.

Except nobody can actually do this because the pattern is fast and spammy enough that it will force you off the optimal circular path every single time. This means you got to improvise each time you go around the circle because your preferred path is going to get cut off at some point and then you got to do some mad dodging skills. Even the best players in the world cannot return to the same pixel as they started each pass. Given enough time, it seems almost certain you will be forced off the circular path completely and then you'll just get trapped in a corner and die. Even top players will make mistakes while going around the circle and you can see the mistakes compound forcing you to do increasingly crazy things the more you get forced off the optimal path to dodge it.

So it's not really surprising that the people who can routinely beat it are the ones with the best reflexes, not the one who has memorized how to go around the pattern. Now you certainly need some degree of memorization, since if you didn't attempt to at least start in the right spot you'd quickly get trapped in a corner and die. But it's not something like Ikaruga or even most of Touhou where if you memorized enough of the patterns, you can be blindfolded and still win. Didn't someone actually do this for Ikaruga? Certainly the guy playing 2 guys at once in Ikaruga relies on memorization.[/i]

Mars Matrix Hyper Solid shooting wins!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-KYmntH ... L&index=91

No way, Barret. That's, like, bullets over 20% of the screen at best. Go watch those Gradius V clips again.

I just am burned out on "bullet hell" in general. It's all the same game with different graphics.

The ship is much bigger than the ship size of an average bullet hell game.

If you look at the option you can buy LOTS of powerups, including tutorials on how you're supposed to dodge all this stuff. That's a good idea of how to design such a game. Obviously you start out getting hammered by the game but as you're able to buy more continues/powerup/etc you'll eventually at least be able to beat the game. Not surprisingly it was made by Capcom as opposed to one of the shooter specialists that have no concern on whether their game is beatable by an average prson.

Do you know why I hate bullet hell games? Because there are games like Assault Heroes instead.

I'm still #9 on Hard on that on the XBox Live leaderboards. My name up in lights!